LXDE: Definitely. Must be kept alive for older/slower computers.MATE: Robust. For my main box.

In my opinion, Cinnamon is not there yet. It is slow, not robust enough yet, doesn't get along well with my NVIDIA hardware, some things are still broken, not much more features than MATE, less customization than MATE, does not match Compiz, etc

I haven't tried Gnome Shell at all. I can't judge.

KDE: found it very annoying last time I tried it, years ago. Maybe it's better now. (?)

Happily using Cinnamon since it was released. It's improving at an incredible rate and offers enough of a featureset without becoming bloated. I'd moved away from KDE after it became so cluttered with options and settings for everything including the kitchen sink. Cinnamon doesn't have that issue, it's my DE of choice.

I will have to stay with a Gnome2 (Not Mate) for a while... need the basic tools, can't find them (or they fail) in the other flavors.

I frequently use Mint 12 and LMDE but Mate is too clunky so I go back to Pinguy to do work... and I MUST have language support.[on a fresh Pinguy install I simply strip out Docky and have Gnome 2]Mate does look promising but it is not mature enough

Last edited by sdibaja on Sat Apr 28, 2012 3:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.

In the mean time, I use XFCE on LMDE. However I replaced Thunar with pcmanfm,since Thunar developers promised to never implement tabs nor dual panes.To that effect, I also added http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net

In my brand new LMDE I am using Gnome shell heavily tweaked ( I find it funny when people say GS can't be customized), and I am using Unity i my Ubuntu partition (i am used to it, and Ubuntu 12.04 looks great).

I gave Cinnamon a try, but I don't really like it, it's a gnome shell without most of the activities overview and with an odd menu instead (I find it much more interesting MGSE than Cinnamon). I have also tried Mate as I've always loved Gnome 2 (it was my first Linux desktop), but after over a year using GS and Unity, I found going back to Gnome 2 weird and a bit frustrating.

Used xfce as last ditch alternative to gnome 3 madness and then i came across cinnamon and been using it ever since and have no regrets(it provides me with exactly what i like: a modern DE that offers a classic,sane&logical way of working on my PC) PS been an avid LMDE user for quite a while now, and i can’t even begin to express my gratitude to mint team for making such a great OS(apart some occasional ‘minor bumps along the road’ its been the most problem free OS i have ever had the pleasure of using) and pairing up a mintified debian with a nice&modern DE like cinnamon the result is simply priceless, like a sweet dream coming true…

After what felt like a big while of Xfce, I switched to Cinnamon and really do not regret it. Xfce is incredible in terms of speed and I loved being able to customize even the last bit of it, but... There were some annoyances for me in regard to multiple desktops, touchpad functionality, desktop management and other tiny things that just made it feel incomplete. Cinnamon feels more up to date in my opinion. On old hardware I would always go back to Xfce and I am very curuious about v4.10, but in the near future it's Cinnamon.

Offtopic: Thanks heaps for LMDe! It took me a step further in my humble skills in regard to Linux. I went over to doing Debian netinstalls and using the LMDe repos so that I have an awesome middleway between a minimal testing and stability.

I voted for KDE, because it is only environment in the entire Linux world, which seems to be completely acceptable for me. The all Gnome versions, forks and clones cause me feeling discomfort. I very hope for common sense of Linux Mint team, and timely support of latest KDE versions.

I like many of those desktops, but voted for the three I use most:Gnome Fallback--with a bit of tweaking is very nice, solid and reliable.Xfce--almost never lets me down, depend upon it on my main machines, light and fast yet configurable.MATE--the new LMDE sold me on the fact it really is Gnome 2 resurrected, I'd say it's 90% right now, I expect in short order it will be 100% and I hope it will pick up where Gnome 2 left off and grow in popularity.KBD47

My DE depends on the machine I'm using. At work, I'm a embedded software and driver writer so I routinely have dozens of windows open. Over the years, I've tweaked my workflow to make use of static workspaces (ie. WS 1 is browser/email/chat stuff, WS 2 is for development, WS 3 is for unix testing and development overflow when WS 2 becomes too "busy", WS 4 and WS 5 are windows remote desktop clients for kernel/slave debugging, WS 6 is for document readers). Maybe I'm old and crotchety but I'm most productive when I have this sort of layout available so Gnome Shell's dynamic workspace paradigm just doesn't work for me. If the last window in WS 4 suddenly closes, I don't want that workspace to magically disappear. As such, I still run Gnome2 on my main work machine. When I finally have to upgrade that machine, I guess I'll experiment with MATE or Xfce or maybe even go back to running Enlightenment.

For my other machines that aren't for primary development, I like Cinnamon okay. It still feels a little rough around the edges for configuration and I've had mixed success getting applets to work but I'll cut it some slack since it's made so much progress so quickly.

Aside: I've tried to like Gnome3. Tried it for a week and couldn't find a way to feel productive using it on a traditional desktop or laptop machine. I'd love to see some youtube videos of software developers using Gnome3 as their main environment just to see what their workflow looks like.

For a session that hasn't even been default in a distro yet, and only included as an alternative option in LMDE, Cinnamon certainly looks to have won a lot of people over. If this poll was partly to gauge which gnome desktop should be "main" in Mint 13, I hope they got their answer

Thank you for this thread. That’s all I can say. You most definitely have made this forum into something special. You clearly know what you are doing, you’ve covered so many bases. Thanks!

Gotta say, Cinnamon is really nice. Shell is workable with extensions, and mate has come a long way. A great fallback setup. I'd vote Cinnamon first, shell second (only because it's the future, like it or not) and mate third.

I have experience only with Gnome 2 and Unity. Currently I'm using Mint 11 Katya with Gnome 2 and plan to continue using it unless Maya proves to be just amazingly better. The Unity interface on Mint 12 is too iphonish for my tastes; I want a desktop interface, not a smartphone interface. Mate is not yet ready for prime time.

Katyanewb wrote:I have experience only with Gnome 2 and Unity. Currently I'm using Mint 11 Katya with Gnome 2 and plan to continue using it unless Maya proves to be just amazingly better. The Unity interface on Mint 12 is too iphonish for my tastes; I want a desktop interface, not a smartphone interface. Mate is not yet ready for prime time.

I see you read the memo floating around that all interfaces departing from Microsoft's Windows 95 setup are smartphone interfaces. That memo was a student prank to see how much gibberish could be generated off a silly claim. There is no Unity in Mint 12 btw.

Thank you for this thread. That’s all I can say. You most definitely have made this forum into something special. You clearly know what you are doing, you’ve covered so many bases. Thanks!